All eyes today are firmly focused on what is happening inside the Westminster bubble, but it’s helpful sometimes to zoom out and get a bit of perspective on Britain’s relationship with continental Europe. Brexit did not emerge out of nowhere: it is the culmination of events that have been under way for decades and have historical roots stretching back well beyond that. And these roots are not only British but European.
Hugo Young’s This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair is a classic: beautifully written, it speaks eloquently to the state of Britain today, through the prism of the lives of a series of British public figures, from Churchill and Bevin, to Gaitskell and Powell, to Thatcher and beyond.
The academic literature on Britain and Europe is vast, but Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon’s Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism is well worth reading. It covers a lot of the same ground as Young, but with a key theme driving the narrative: the ways in which Britain tried to deal with the competing claims of Europe and the Commonwealth. In the 1940s it seemed logical to think that there were no trade-offs involved: sufficiently loose arrangements might allow Britain to accommodate both sets of relationships, and both identities. And in any event to be European then was still to be imperialist, so there was no need to choose. But things soon changed, and the choice when it came proved difficult.
Understanding Britain is not enough: you also have to understand continental Europe, its raison d’être, and how it has changed over time. Alan Milward’s The European Rescue of the Nation-State is an obvious place to start: European integration was not seen in the 1950s as a threat to the nation state. Rather, it was a way for nation states to collectively provide the political and economic stability that citizens craved, and which European nation states had so conspicuously failed to provide. And so it necessarily had to involve more than just trade liberalisation.
Completing the Internal Market, the 1985 European Commission White Paper prepared by Arthur Cockfield, spells out exactly why the single market was needed: “The reason for getting rid entirely of physical and other controls between Member States is not one of theology or appearance, but the hard practical fact that the maintenance of any internal frontier controls will perpetuate the costs and disadvantages of a divided market.” The white paper is available online and in English, and some MPs may find it instructive.
Brexit is reminding people across Europe of the EU’s many benefits, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the forces that have increased Euroscepticism, not only in the UK but across the continent. Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy by Peter Mair, is a short, readable, insightful essay on Europe’s crisis of democratic legitimacy. The European Union, he argues, has limited the range of choices available to national governments, and has thus “played a major role in the hollowing out of policy competition between political parties at the national level”. The consequence has been “depoliticization and disengagement”.
One view of Brexit relates it to similar political trends in the US, France and elsewhere. An alternative view sees it as being largely about British culture, and the argument is brilliantly made in Fintan O’Toole’s very funny Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain. One of the only upsides of Brexit from the point of view of Ireland’s political class is that O’Toole’s polemical skills have been temporarily diverted from his traditional target, namely them: presumably, when the dust eventually settles, usual service will resume. A good antidote to excessively deterministic accounts of Brexit is provided by Dominic Cummings’ blog post, “On the referendum #21: Branching histories of the 2016 referendum and ‘the frogs before the storm’”. As Cummings says, “Reality has branching histories, not ‘a big why’”, and he argues that reality could easily have branched in a different direction in 2016.
Tony Connelly’s Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response is indispensable. Hopefully his remarkable series of long form essays on the RTÉ website means that he is working on a follow-up. And finally I am looking forward to reading David Allen Green’s Brexit: What Everyone Needs to Know when it appears this summer.
• Kevin O’Rourke’s A Short History of Brexit is published by Pelican.
